Courtesy of the Little Mexican Cooking School

I received a telephone call from a FOOD JOBS book reader who has just lost her job and doesn’t know what to do now. She wanted something new. She had worked as a caterer, recipe tester, food stylist, freelance magazine food writer and cookbook editor.

With these skills, I suggested she consider becoming a teacher in a cooking school. Her topic could be any one of the specialties or she could actually teach a course on FOOD JOBS!

In fact, I started out as a cooking school teacher in Greensboro, North Carolina. I demonstrated a complete meal in each class, but told little stories about the ingredients I was using. Many came more for the stories than the cooking class itself. I later expanded these tentative steps into a course that nestled comfortably beneath the umbrella of gastronomy.

If you want to teach, but not cook, maybe you would like to consider the endless and ever expanding topic, ‘Food in the News’. The advantage of offering these subjects is you can be in charge of your own material and develop your own course guide.

I’m teaching FOOD JOBS* and get a huge amount of satisfaction from the classes and the enthusiasm of the students.  The best part is that I learn something new every day.

Professional cooking schools are thriving everywhere. So are community colleges. Many high schools also include hospitality courses in their culinary curricula.

With the help of ShawGuides, my caller can easily locate a Culinary School at the Arts Institutes, Cordon Bleu cooking school or other professional, avocational cooking school or a community college wherever she wants to live. (She would like to move from her current location to a warmer climate in another part of the country.)

I sent her a sample course guide and advised her to adapt it so that a Dean of Education could see exactly what she had in mind. Her proposed syllabus should also include a brief outline for a series of six (or more) classes. Here below is such an example:

Syllabus Sample Template

CATALOG COURSE DESCRIPTION: FOOD CAREERS

This Food Careers course will introduce the extensive range of career opportunities. The classes will help participants evaluate their own unique skills and encourage them to explore the many paths open to them. There are literally hundreds of job opportunities available to today’s graduates.  They need only bend down and pick up the prospect that is most appealing.

SAMPLE APPEAL TO STUDENTS TO TAKE YOUR FOOD CAREERS COURSE

The reason you decided to acquire an education at XXX Culinary School is to find a career in the food field. There is almost nothing more important than developing a sense of direction and ultimately being in a position to choose a path that will lead to a richly rewarding life. Together, we will examine many specific fields within the hospitality industry.

It is essential to understand the factors that contribute to the success (or failure) of a food business. You will be encouraged to track economic, political and demographic trends as they impact the hospitality industry and exert a strong influence on our current and future food choices.

You will also discover the importance of thoroughly researching a company before applying for a position. You will receive practical guidance to write a result-oriented resume and cover letter, and learn how to develop positive interviewing strategies. Class discussions will include the art of negotiation and emphasize that acceptance or rejection of a specific offer is limited not only to the size of the salary or the number of benefits: there are other important matters that must be taken into consideration too.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

At the end of this course you will be in a position to define your goals and begin to take practical steps to plan your future career. You will be able to :

• Describe the difference between a job and a career

• Develop a strategy for job hunting

• Identify the advantages and disadvantages of working in each sector of the hospitality industry

• Identify the most influential publications and reliable web sites within each sector of the hospitality industry

• Identify food trends and extrapolate probable trajectories of each trend

• Evaluate the impact of changing consumer choices

• Evaluate the impact of changing economic conditions

• Compose a personal portfolio of your work

• Outline a plan to market your business and build client referrals

• Understand the vital importance of networking

• Prepare a business proposal

• Describe the steps necessary to achieve your personal career objective

• Describe the economic and demographic reasons that justify an entrepreneurial objective

• Assess the business impacts of the “green” revolution

INSTRUCTOR

Add your name here and summarize your background.

Sound easy? It still takes effort. If this course of action appeals, you still have to put yourself out there and do the heavy leg work. But once you have a focus and a goal in mind, the hard work turns into a matter of steps to follow down a virtual yellow brick road.

Please contact me if you have a question about your own career.

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Karen Berner, Food Editor, photo courtesy of Gloria Dawson

There are very few people I know whose career paths have moved in a straight line. The real constant is how they have matched and used their innate skills with their passion and possibility. I find these people the most interesting, don’t you? Take Karen Berner, for instance.

Karen is a successful food editor of websites and print, who combined a Fine Arts degree, an editor’s eye for accuracy, and a former IBM technical writer’s ability to communicate clearly and concisely. And, she changed careers to pursue her passion for food. Here, below, in her own words, is Karen’s recipe for success:

My path to the food-editorial world was somewhat unconventional. A career-changer at 37, I decided to pursue my secret dream of becoming a professional chef by enrolling at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). But once there, I quickly realized there were many other interesting careers related to food outside of a restaurant kitchen.

My initial thoughts of happily toiling away behind the line changed when I was given the opportunity to do studio and test kitchen work for a food website geared to both professional chefs and cooking enthusiasts. It was the perfect fit; I’d be intimately involved with food, but this type of work would also tap into my creative side, one I still like to nurture every day.

Culinary Institute of America

My beginnings in the food world were humble. I started out working part-time in the CIA cookbook department, dealing with recipes for every cuisine under the sun. This job quickly led to producing food content and recipes in a test kitchen for a website. Here, I further honed my recipe development and editing skills as well as food-styling and photography abilities.

Working at a website, you’re often called on to wear many hats. So, I soon took on the responsibility of interviewing celebrity chefs. I’m sure their insights and contributions inspire many a student and food lover to follow their culinary path, myself included.

I later was able to transfer my skills to print media, working on the well-regarded Art Culinaire magazine for professional chefs. I essentially was doing the same work I handled for the website but took on more writing assignments. I also learned the tools necessary for putting a magazine together, including dealing with the pressures of deadlines and scheduling. My experience interviewing chefs came in handy; I was able to contribute to the popularity of the magazine while feeding the growing appetite for the inside scoop on celebrity and up-and-coming chefs.

I’d like to think that everything I’ve done up to now – writing, website work, technology knowledge, line cooking, recipe testing, teaching, and even experience as a private chef – has ultimately contributed to what I do today and aspire to do tomorrow.

Many have asked me what skills have made me a successful food editor. I think this can be boiled down to seven:

1. Keeping on top of food trends that you know will interest your readers.
2. Being able to purpose recipe and content that’s useful, approachable, friendly, and will appeal to a mass audience.
3. Strong writing and editing skills, and the ability to adapt to a magazine, cookbook, or a website’s established voice, tone, and style. (Think Martha Stewart vs. Rachael Ray.)
4. Strong management and organizational skills.
5. Great contacts in the food industry.
6. Solid recipe writing skills and the ability to edit ornery recipes when they’re problematic.
7. Being able to look at a recipe and troubleshoot what might be wrong with it before you’ve had the chance to test it.

Experience is key and critical to success, but it’s not always enough to land your dream job. Networking (whether via the latest social media venues or simply by getting out there and shaking a few hands) and perseverance are just as important.

Although I’ve worked in many parts of the food industry, I’m most comfortable in a kitchen, where I’m developing and testing recipes, whether for magazines, websites, or cookbooks. Having a solid recipe and ingredient base knowledge opens many a door. Why, I’ve even judged the famous Pillsbury Bake-Off baking contest. What a hoot!

I’ve also had the opportunity to teach the fundamentals of cooking to food enthusiasts and found this to be extremely rewarding.

I’m happy to share that after many years in the industry I still enjoy what I do — it’s challenging.  It’s never the same from day to day, and I get paid to eat. Not too shabby.

But it is important to keep growing, to keep dreaming up the next adventure. If I have my way, my next food adventure will be working on a TV show as part of a culinary production team. I think my test kitchen, food-styling, food photography, management, directing and editing skills will be a value add to the production.

If you’d like to contact Karen, you can reach her at kbern57@hotmail.com.

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Decisions, Decisions… You’d think, it would be relatively easy to decide what to do next. The fortunate few do indeed know exactly what they what they want to do. The rest of us must wrestle with uncertainty and anxiety or as the Cheshire Cat said to Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.”

We all face the puzzle of what to do next: there are far too many choices. For example, if  you decide to write a book with the title, The Chicken Dishes of the World, you’ll drown. You will never be able to make even the smallest dent in so large a topic. It would be far easier to narrow the field and concentrate on the Chicken Dishes of Chicago.

I’m going to suggest two diametrically opposite ways to starting a job search. The first is to take your time and use a telescope to explore all the possibilities and all the possibilities within the possibilities. Only then will you be able to employ a microscope, (the opposite way), to refine your options.

You could decide to become a tea taster or a coffee taster or an ice cream taster or an account executive promoting beef or pork or peaches or pears or another commodity. You could become a personal chef.

Personal chefs are a rapidly-expanding segment of the food world. This is a food job that enables you to become an entrepreneur without investing any capital. If you are a good cook, you don’t even need to have a formal degree from a culinary school. Did you know that the U.S. Postal Service once employed a personal chef to provide meals for the cycling team it sponsored?

You could also think about becoming a private chef for a movie star, a sports hero or a television anchor.

A private chef is not the same thing as a personal chef.

A chef can earn $80,000 a year— tax free—working on a luxury yacht, cruising the Greek Islands. The perks here are: there is no rent to pay, no car payments to make and there are plenty of people to sleep with every night.

Recipe developers working for NASA come up with ideas for dinner for astronauts. They can also find employment with food companies and restaurant chains and supermarkets. Recipe testers check the accuracy of recipes for magazines, cookbook authors and food  processors.

Recipe developers are not the same thing as recipe testers.

As you see each different career category contains its own specialized branch and we’ll explore each area as we go along with later posts.

A food lover with a vibrant palate and the ability to write well but with no formal culinary degree may find happiness as a restaurant critic or restaurant memoirist.

Perhaps, you could consider a career as: a literary agent; a cheese shop owner; a food and travel writer; an artisanal bread baker; a wedding cake designer; a food photographer; a bed & breakfast owner; a food entrepreneur or investor or a teacher. There are more jobs opportunities to explore than you may have imagined.

Donald Rumsfeld

As former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously observed: “There are known knowns: these are things we know we know. There are known unknowns: these are things we know we don’t know. There are unknown unknowns: there are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Whether you are interested in science or supermarkets, in engineering or accounting, human relations or writing, in traveling or staying at home, there is a job in the food field for you. Better yet, you can dream up something that had never been done before and make it happen.

After all, the food world involves history and geography, science and technology,  economics and finance, art and design, marketing and publicity and literally dozens of other disciplines. Your task is to decide which path to take.

Christopher Robin & Winnie the Pooh

I came across a lovely quote from Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh. He said, “Promise me you’ll always remember you are braver than you believe and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

And do you remember Dr. Benjamin Spock, who comforted generations of anxious mothers by saying, “You know more than you think you do.”

You can start your journey to find a new career by imagining you are Santa Claus. Make a list of all your qualifications. What have you done so far? Where have you been. What have you learned? Who do you know? The last thing on this list may be the most important.

Fill several sacks with all this information and pile them on the sled. Rewrite your resume. Compose a cover letter. Have a new photograph taken. Put on your Santa’s suit frame of mind. Climb aboard the driver’s seat and take the reins of the reindeer. They will run neck and neck with one animal getting his nose ahead with a surge of hope, and the other falling a little behind as his stomach churns with fear. Whichever gains the ascendancy will determine the road you take.

As Suze Ormand tells us: “You Own the Power to Control Your Own Destiny.”

Now I have two more pieces of advice. One is illegitimi non carborundum, which freely translated means, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

I’ll share the other piece of advice next Monday so I hope to bring it with you then. In the meantime, I’ll continue the food writing posts every Wednesday.

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